The fact that What Hi-Fi? is enjoying its 50th anniversary is an uncomplicated reason for celebration, of course, and is deserving of no little admiration too.
Personally, though, I find it a slightly bittersweet occasion – for no other reason than I was the editor of What Hi-Fi? on the occasion of its 40th birthday. I vividly remember the feeling of excitement and, mostly, relief when that good-looking 40th anniversary issue arrived from the printer – and I’m not going to lie, the knowledge that ten years have passed since then makes me feel even older than I usually do.
I joined What Hi-Fi? as a staff writer at the very end of 2003, and I became features editor and then deputy editor; I became editor towards the end of 2012.
Unlike quite a few people who went on to occupy senior editorial roles at What Hi-Fi? I didn’t start out in the stockroom – part of me thinks that’s because the magazine couldn’t wait to get my copy onto its pages, but the bigger part of me knows it’s because I would have been a rotten stockroom manager. Even back then I had no more than two days per week of lifting and fetching and carrying in me before I had to lie down for an extended period of time.
I was editor for just shy of half a dozen years – and so I am more than willing to take an appropriate amount of credit (almost 12 percent of 50 year’s-worth, if my maths is correct) for the fact that What Hi-Fi? flourished during that period, just as it had done before my stewardship and has continued to do since.
The broad editorial template – to offer readers sincere, impartial and expert advice about a wide range of audio/visual electronics, with the emphasis strongly on value for money – had been established long before my tenure, and I know for a fact it hasn’t changed in any fundamental way since.
It’s a demonstrably successful formula, after all, and it will require a personality considerably more iconoclastic than mine to meddle with it.
The decision to add the words ‘Sound and Vision’ beneath ‘What Hi-Fi?’ on the masthead had been taken a fair while before I joined, and during my time as editor I embarked on a long, concerted and determined campaign of ‘going on and on’ in an effort to get it taken off again.
The January 2016 issue was the first to simply carry the What Hi-Fi? branding since 2001. “Everyone knows we cover video equipment as well as audio equipment,” ran my cunningly simplistic argument, “and the What Hi-Fi? brand is plenty strong enough to communicate that fact by itself.”
But there’s no denying that, for the first few years of my editorship, at least, it was around the video products, rather than the audio products, that much of the real innovation was happening.
That’s not to say audio products were standing still, of course. It was during the period I was in charge that wireless, multi-room, voice-controlled and otherwise smart speakers gained something approaching ubiquity.
Although it would have taken quite a feat of imagination to predict the resurgence of compact disc as a viable and popular storage format, the vinyl revival* was in full swing (so much so, in fact, that our friends at Rega supplied a limited edition of just three ‘What Hi-Fi? 1976-2016’ turntables which we gave away to readers as prizes in a 40th-anniversary competition).
(*I solemnly promise, here and now, I will never use the phrase ‘vinyl revival’ ever again.)
And it was towards the end of 2014 that Tidal launched, turning music-streaming services from highly compressed triumphs of convenience over quality into authentically worthwhile sources of high-resolution audio.
But in video equipment, the market was expanding in all directions at once. And not just in the average size of televisions being sold (which rose from around 36 inches in 2012 to 47 inches in 2018 – and currently sits at around 55 inches, despite the fact that no one’s house seems to have got any bigger).
At the end of 2012, Sony launched the very first ‘Ultra HD’ (quickly rebranded as ‘4K’) television for consumers. The 84-inch KD-84X9000 cost $25k, and came with a custom Dell media player loaded with 10 4K movies – handy, given that no native 4K content was available at this point.
By 2013, though, Netflix and YouTube were offering native 4K streaming, and it only took until the end of 2014 for the first 4K Blu-ray players (and the accompanying discs) to be announced.
It wasn’t until the start of 2016 that What Hi-Fi? reviewed the first 4K Blu-ray player a manufacturer was brave enough to submit for testing. It’s safe to say the Panasonic DMP-UB900 (yours for £600 at the time) impressed us – “the future of home cinema, on disc” and “a devastating first blow” were among the accolades in the review. There may even have been an “oh wow!" in there somewhere.
But, of course, What Hi-Fi? is never going to imply that anything is perfect – “sound could be a little more agile” was the one meaningful criticism we could muster.
LG attempted to democratise both 4K and OLED TV technology at CES in 2013 with the announcement of a 55-inch model (its previous OLEDs had been no bigger than 15 inches) that sold for a mere $10,000. Dolby whipped the covers off Dolby Vision HDR in 2014 and by 2015 it was appearing in the mainstream television market.
And in 2017, Samsung – which had spent the previous five years decrying OLED technology as some kind of bourgeois affectation – unveiled its QLED TV technology. Because if there’s one thing the consumer electronics industry loves to do, it’s to throw as many competing formats at the wall as possible in order to establish if any of them will stick.
Of course, the Holy Grail of consumer electronics is ‘convergence’ – or, at least, it is as far as the actual consumers are concerned.
In 2012, Dolby launched Dolby Atmos spatial audio, upgrading 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound with dynamic, object-based, immersive sound. By 2015, the technology was showing up in AV receivers and soundbars (and those receivers and soundbars were being reviewed by What Hi-Fi?) and the more intrepid streaming platforms were fully on board too.
And by the time I vacated the editor’s chair, Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision were integrated into television and projectors, while spatial audio had taken its place alongside multi-room sound as a ‘must-have’ for music and movie fans alike. The line between the ‘audio’ and ‘home cinema’ markets has only continued to get more blurred.
It’s safe to say I have never been happier – in my professional life, anyway – than when I was working at What Hi-Fi?. I got to listen, and then paid to write about what I’d heard. I went to places I would never have otherwise been.
And most of all, I met some people – colleagues, members of the consumer electronics industry, readers of the magazine and the website – who I am still in touch with nearly a decade later and some of whom mean a great deal to me.
I realise this is a fairly sentimental way of viewing what was, after all, simply a job at a consumer advice magazine. But the fact that What Hi-Fi? has been around for 50 years lets you know that it has never been any ordinary enterprise.
I don’t doubt for a second that someone (probably as-yet unborn) will be writing with great nostalgia and affection about their time at What Hi-Fi? when its 100th anniversary comes around.
MORE:
What will hi-fi look like in 2076? We asked some of the most influential experts in the industry
